files The King's Peace, 1637-41, read online The King's Peace, 1637-41, free The King's Peace, 1637-41, free The King's Peace, 1637-41, The King's Peace, 1637-41 5891d0604 The King S Peace Day By Day, Almost Hour By Hour, C V Wedgwood Describes The Four Uneasy Years That Were To Explode Into Civil War A Devastation That Cost King Charles His Life And Won The Rebels Their Revolution Conveying The Bewildering Momentum Of Events As The King S Peace Is Overtaken By Suspicion, Disorder And The Sword, She Writes History, Said The Times, In The Only Way Taht Matters, As A Living Re Creation Of The Past A Superb Book, Beautifully Written I Have No Doubt At All That She Makes The Onset Of The Civil War Intelligible Than Any Historian Before Her A L RowseThe King S War And The Trial Of Charles I Are Also Published By Penguin

10 thoughts on “The King's Peace, 1637-41”

Good intentions often go bad That is perhaps the great moral of Wedgwood s history of the years when Charles I lost control of his three kingdoms I m still reading it in what seems to be part of some bizarre subconscious syllabus of books that Ward Cleaver might have read if you can imagine him ever reading anything but the newspaper Nevertheless, below are a few stray thoughts on the work and the author.Wedgwood has wrongly suffered academic scorn as a popularizer If anything she was a high brow popularizer, living in her subjects worlds, and writing in a style echoing the greatest English historians and that was still very much her own As to her argument, it is actually somewhat compelling and has found echoes in recent historiography.Charles I, Wedgwood argues, was a well meaning man but with only the barest grasp on the real situation of his kingdoms He lived life in a court where he controlled the minutest details of protocol, surrounding him in the illusion of mastery, an illusion he thought applied outside of Whitehall He understood politics through ideals Court masques where virtues crushed vices were accurate reflections of how Charles I viewed politics and the kingly office Despite what Wedgwood describes as his allegorical turn of mind, the king had some decided policies Charles was a militant for moderation Wedgwood never uses such a paradoxical or ready term but that is the gist of her analysis She dwells, for instance, on the king s schemes to reunite Christendom under a reformed Catholicism for which the Church of England would have provided the model To this end he was in general lenient toward Roman Catholics and punished Calvinists Of course, Star Chamber often handed down sentences on both but any tolerance of Catholics always received far greater attention in England He held back from the Thirty Years War, though his neutrality was paid for in part by Spanish silver from Peru, shipped through England and minted there before heading to the Netherlands to pay Catholic armies He kept England out of a continental war he lamented as disastrous and unnecessary Even the plight of his sister, Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, darling of the Protestant Cause, did not alter his course.What made sense to the king perplexed and outraged his subjects They doubted his intentions and misinterpreted his policies, says Wedgwood Moreover, Charles suffered from a dearth of able councilors Thomas Wentworth and Archbishop Laud come in for surprising praise from Wedgwood surprising to this reader, anyway The author, after all, wrote an admiring biography of Strafford Her attitudes changed over time but in general he and Laud come across in this volume as some of the only people who truly recognized the dangers of the king s situation in the late 1630s.Lastly, Wedgwood has something to say about religious fanaticism To borrow from another work of English history, it was A Very Bad Thing For instance, Lord Warriston, a leading Scottish Covenanter, receives a heap of amusing scorn for what Wedgwood concludes was his mistaken conviction that he conversed with and enjoyed the approval of God Almighty Himself In another case, Wedgwood writes dismissively of a prophetess who shows up in Edinburgh convulsing and decreeing that God had damned the King s alternative to the Covenant Elsewhere, Wedgwood sneers at the popular outbursts against the established religion In general, she asserts that the crowds causing all the ruckus over the Scottish Prayer Book were not acting of their own volition, but by direction from a few at the top and you may judge the motives of these leading men as you will One would be tempted to say that Wedgwood s problem with popular activism is that she has no room for it in her Great Man theory of history and a Great Man history largely from the royalist perspective to boot I think this would be a mistake What really seems to bother he is the abuse of belief She is convinced that the real passions of the people over religion were being exploited by ambitious men who should have known better This seems to be about than her commitment to the individual as the real mover of history This counts for a great deal, too, but may risk overshadowing a deep skepticism about revealed religion and its place in the politics of the time.

This was a complex period, with so much going on all over Europe and in the new colonies as well as in Britain, and with so many, many players on the stage CV Wedgewood is a good writer and storyteller, and makes the events of the time as coherent as any such troubled period could be Nothing happens in a vacuum and none of the actors are without their flaws King Charles had this awful knack for saying and doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, which made him look devious than he actually was He consistently appointed incompetent and self serving advisors, and did things to please his temperamental, conspiracy loving Catholic wife I kept wanting to shake him and shout, Wake up But he never saw the reality of how his people felt until it was too late, and lived in an imagined England of his own.

Very good, very detailed account of 4 years in the reign of King Charles I It manages not to bore while going into what, in other books, might be excruciating detail Wedgwood really helped me to better understand what happened to Charles as well as how and why.

This account of the last few years of the personal rule of Charles I begins with Charles as, apparently, the happiest King in Christendom and ends with the king on the road to London, heading for confrontation with the Long Parliament It s a brilliant frame for a complex narrative that takes in Ship Money, the Bishops Wars, the fall of Wentworth and Laud, and the Irish Rebellion, and that involves a huge cast of characters in England, Scotland, and Ireland Despite the complexity, Wedgwood s control of the flow of events is hugely impressive even, at times, thrilling, especially in the build up to the execution of Strafford , her writing crystal clear, and her willingness to make judgements, especially about people, stimulating Charles I and Hamilton come out of it badly, Strafford and Laud surprisingly well I found it both enjoyable and informative, although it occurs to me that I might be the ideal reader for this book, having enough basic knowledge of the political history of the 1630s to keep my head above water, and insufficient expertise in the historiography of the period to judge whether Wedgwood s analysis than 60 years old now has stood the test of time I m looking forward to reading the sequel.

This is a very, very good history with a very large caveat The opening is brilliant an eagle eyed survey of the Isles that is absolutely masterful But then the eye falls to a narrative weighed down by the detail An incredibly detailed detail, it is one without an introduction, one that thrusts the reader back into 1637 without an overlay of 1636 or any year precedent Characters are introduced without introduction, major events occur without warning Do not come to this book without a knowledge of the history it tells or it will mercilessly show you the exit It will entertain the reader s basic understanding of the events with moments of brilliance see for example the fall of Strafford but will leave that reader begging for an intermediary source the majority of the time Perhaps there is hope for the advanced reader but alas this reviewer is not one.

Understanding the history of the government of the British Government is kind of like understanding the rules of Cricket it doesn t appear to be possible At the time of history that covers this book, King Charles I was king of three nations, not yet united His rule of England was absolute, but not absolute His rule of Scotland was basically in name only and his rule of Ireland was remote On top of that, England was still in the midst of major religious turmoil as the Puritans were out to kill and destroy anyone and anything that was not Puritan, the Scots who were trying to not let the Church of England nor the Catholic church into Scotland, and Ireland that was trying to regain their Catholic base Add on top of this the Parliament that was either in session or disbanded When the King needed money to invade Scotland, he recalled Parliament to raise taxes When he recalled the Parliament, the House of Commons quickly went about to bring to court for treason as many of the King s advisors as they could, which led to beheadings War with Scotland, war with Ireland, internal wars, war with the Natherlands.all before the first Civil War which ended with the beheading of the King So, which is easier to understand Cricket or the English government

Dame Cicely Veronica Wedgwood on the fatal flaw of King Charles I He was of the intractable stuff of which martyrs are made not the swift, ecstatic martyrs who run upon death in a high impulsive fervour, but the sad, thoughtful martyrs who follow over long, patient years some logical sequence of thought and action which always may, and sometimes must, bring them to disaster On the political situation at the opening of the Long Parliament, November 1640 Neither Bedford, Pym nor any of them harboured a thought so shocking as the removal of the King but they did envisage of a policy by which his theoretical power and his actual power should be brought into line with each other and properly defined Otherwise they might risk the continuance of the present intolerable situation in which the King directed policy without power to execute it, and they, with power to prevent and obstruct policy, had none to direct it.

Not quite a scholarly book, since it is focussed on description of what was happening, and people involved, than on analysis, but it isn t easy reading either It has made me much interested in the Stewarts and the chaos of those times in that country remind me of some things happening in my country, now.

Very good account of the events leading up to the civil wars of the 1640s in England And as a book, the Folio Society s edition is physically beautiful, and wonderful book to possess by that measure alone.